Building Bridges Across Languages: Reflections from the Ensuring Full Literacy Annual Meeting in Edmonton
By Carlos Perez Valle, PhD Candidate, McGill University
This year, attending the Ensuring Full Literacy (EFL) Annual Meeting in Edmonton was more than a professional milestone — it was a reminder of why I decided to pursue a PhD focused on literacy. As a doctoral candidate studying literacy development among Latinx immigrant families in Montréal, I often find myself torn between the intellectual demands of research and the emotional weight of what is happening back home in New York and across the U.S. — from ICE raids, rising anti-immigrant sentiment to defunding of public education and healthcare. These are not abstract headlines; they are realities for people like me, my family, and the families I now work with in Canada.
Amidst this tension, the EFL community provided a much-needed sanctuary: a space for introspection, connection, and a sense of belonging where my voice was not just heard but valued.
Rooted in Reality: Research That Reflects Lives
The poster I presented at this year’s meeting highlighted the crucial role of culturally responsive literacy materials. Based on early findings from phase 1 of my doctoral dissertation project, it showcased how two Latinx parents (Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Chile) support the literacy development of their preschool-aged children enrolled in French-language institutions in Montréal. These parents shared a powerful desire to maintain their children’s Spanish fluency, especially in expressive vocabulary and writing. At the same time, they embraced the opportunities for the entire family unit to learn Canada’s official languages. Both parents accepted the fact that their children could develop French (and possibly English) and did not worry about them learning these languages through school. However, they are acutely aware of the emotional, cultural, and cognitive value of preserving their heritage language. This sentiment may also be a response to the rise of nativist rhetoric filled with messages to ‘go back home’ and constant changes to immigration policies and procedures.
Moreover, parents in my study expressed a significant lack of culturally relevant Spanish-language materials in Montréal. Despite the city having a network of libraries that offer some books in languages other than French or English (Paola Picco, 2008; Ville de Montréal, n.d.), the parents in this sample resorted to importing books from abroad or relying on family members to send them. What they truly need are books that reflect their home cultures, use familiar idioms, and align with their new trans-national Canadian context. This initial analysis from these two parents suggests that parents want books that support emotional connection and oral creativity across all their children’s languages, not just in one language.
Insights from the Conference: Digital Distractions, Trauma, and Language Access
Several EFL sessions brought the issues expressed by parents in my doctoral thesis project into sharper focus. Dr. Hélène Deacon’s presentation on digital versus paper reading comprehension reaffirmed the need for high-quality children’s books, especially in heritage languages. Her research showed that children tend to comprehend text better on paper than on digital devices, where hyperlinks and other “bells and whistles” can distract and reduce cognitive engagement. These findings affirm what parents in my study intuitively know: the material matters and digital supports/features must be intentionally embedded to support the parent-child reading experience.
Dr. Kaja Jasińska’s work on trauma and brain plasticity brought a sobering reminder: adversity (such as forced migration, poverty, or institutional discrimination) can accelerate brain maturation in children, narrowing the window of optimal learning. This evidence has direct implications for how we support refugee and immigrant youth in literacy development. Dr. Jasińska also identified that motivation seems to open periods of plasticity in many of the children that her lab has studied which warrants further investigation of factors that promote this psycho-social dimension of reading. As such, literacy struggles are not just academic; they are much more complex.
Dr. Guofang Li and Dr. Henny Yeung’s work with after-school programs serving immigrant children in Vancouver shows promise that literacy issues often associated with immigrant children may be mitigated by the types of materials and literacy experiences provided to them. Based on their findings, it may be that when allowed to engage in culturally responsive literacy experiences, neurological and emotionally rooted learning issues (like those identified in Dr. Jasińska’s lab) may be curtailed by the types of books and literacy experiences that promote motivation among children and their families.
Lastly, Dr. Becky Chen’s sessions highlighted the inadequacy of current benchmarks and assessment practices for French immersion learners. Most tools are designed for native French speakers, and applying monolingual norms to multilingual children can lead to misdiagnosis and missed opportunities. Her call for more inclusive, localized data is critical, especially for communities like the one I am working with (Spanish-French bilingual preschool children and their families). These findings are something that I will keep in mind as I continue to develop the second phase of my thesis project, where I will gather emergent literacy intake measures to assess the potential impact of culturally responsive materials on child learning following parent-child dialogic reading.
Together, these talks underscored the urgency of responsive, culturally grounded, and developmentally informed literacy research.
Methodological Grounding: Research That Serves Communities
Lastly, in the trainee session led by Dr. Carrie Demmans Epp, I was reminded that methodology is not just about techniques — it is about values. Her framing of transformative mixed methods, grounded in social justice and participatory approaches, validated the choices I am making in my doctoral dissertation project.
For phase one, I am conducting qualitative interviews with two groups of parents to understand the content and features they would like to see in eBooks. Then, using their feedback, I will edit the Spanish and English-language eBooks to be used in phase 2. I will do this to ensure that the books are tailored to their cultural and linguistic realities. Such methods are not just data collection; it is collaboration. As Dr. Demmans Epp explained, data is not inherently quantitative or qualitative. What matters is how we treat it and for whom it is intended. In my case, I plan to develop two eBooks that reinforce parent-child shared reading in the home language and culture via insights from parent interviews. Then, I will compare parent and children reading these books with reading a commercially available eBook in French using concurrent mixed methods to provide a comprehensive analysis of within- and across-group differences of Spanish-French and English-French bilingual preschoolers and their parents.
Although exploratory, my goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how culturally responsive materials may support the development of emergent literacy in bilingual preschoolers and the universality of such approaches in the unique context of Québec. Findings may contribute to the evolution of theoretical literacy frameworks, such as the Active View of Reading (Burns et al., 2023) or the Asset-Based Interactive View of Reading (Gabriel & López, 2024) and inform efforts to better support multilingual families. This research may also guide educators, policymakers, and literacy organizations in promoting equitable access to high-quality, culturally and linguistically responsive early literacy experiences.
Looking Forward: What Literacy Must Mean in Canada
To ensure full literacy in Canada’s future, we must begin with the realities of its present. According to Statistics Canada (2024), the Latin American population in Canada has tripled between 1996 and 2021, with Colombia and Mexico being two of the largest source countries. The various Latinx communities in Canada are not monolithic. Their reasons for migration vary widely, from economic opportunity to fleeing violence and persecution. Nearly half of Colombian and Mexican immigrants arrived as refugees, challenging the stereotype of Latinx immigrants as purely economic actors (StatsCan, 2024).
Nevertheless, as Ibrahim and Jian (2023) describe, Canada’s immigration policies welcome some groups of Latinx migrants as temporary workers but deny them long-term protection and resources, especially when admitted as asylum seekers from certain countries like Mexico. Many migrants are left in legal limbo as they are welcomed for their labor but denied protection and long-term stability (Calderón Moya, 2021). Such precariousness extends to every aspect of family life, including education and child-rearing in Canada.
As Armony (2017) and Calderón Moya (2021) point out, many Latin American immigrants in Canada, despite having high levels of education and work experience, face lower average incomes and poorer labor outcomes, particularly in Québec. These socioeconomic barriers, combined with a multilingual burden (navigating Spanish, French, and English and in some cases, Indigenous languages from Latin America), create unique challenges for Latinx families that face acculturation pressures in Québec to learn French while maintaining their cultural and linguistic identity not just as a connection to their country of origin but as a safeguard due to immigration instability.
However, there is resilience. Armony (2017) demonstrates that Latin American communities are young, diverse, and rapidly growing, particularly in Québec, where Spanish is the second-most spoken unofficial language, after Arabic. This resilience is what inspired the setting of my Spanish-language eBook, based on observations I made along Rue St. Hubert, which has been renamed as El Barrio Latino or the “Little Latin America” of Montréal (for more see Brabant, 2017). The growth of Little Latin America in Montreal is a key representation of how Latinx families bring with them a rich linguistic heritage and a strong desire to maintain their languages, not only for cultural continuity, but for their children’s emotional and cognitive well-being, and as a family safeguard.
So, what does ensuring full literacy mean in Canada? It must mean:
- Multilingual access: Literacy support should reflect all the languages spoken in homes, not just the official languages of Canada. As reminded in our conference by Delaney Lothian (former student at Dr. Demmans Epp’s lab and researcher at the National Research Council of Canada), before Canada there was a tapestry of many languages spoken by Indigenous peoples. Thus, supporting literacy means supporting multilingualism which has been a tradition since before colonialism.
- Localized equity: Latinx families in Québec face specific barriers — from restricted language use in schools (e.g., Bill 94 in Québec) to reduced availability of Spanish-language children’s books in public libraries. Literacy initiatives must consider provincial variation and policy.
- Policy with integrity: Canada cannot celebrate diversity while upholding immigration policies that restrict access to it. Full literacy includes legal literacy, linguistic recognition, and community validation.
- Centering lived experience: Latinx parents, like those in my study, are telling us what they need — culturally relevant, linguistically appropriate materials that reflect their children’s lives. They deserve to be heard, and their knowledge deserves to be incorporated into the systems designed to serve them, so that they can have an easier and less traumatic time in their new home by using their home language and culture as a source of knowledge.
In a country as socially and linguistically diverse as Canada, literacy must reflect regional realities while upholding a commitment to equity across communities. This means recognizing the needs of children who speak heritage languages at home but attend institutions that use the official language. It means ensuring that libraries carry more than just translations. In our modern world, libraries can provide culturally rooted stories that help children feel seen and parents feel validated as their children’s first teachers. Moreover, it means listening to immigrant parents who are not just raising children but raising future multilingual global citizens that will uplift Canada into the future.
Final Reflection: Literacy as Belonging
We all know that at its heart, literacy is not just about reading and writing. It is about belonging. This belonging refers to the ability to understand, to be understood, and to tell your story in your voice. For Latinx families in Montréal, for the children in my study, and so many others across Canada, literacy means being able to fully express oneself and be understood in every language they speak, as expressed by the mother from Chile in my poster presentation.
As I continue to process the parent interviews for Phase 1 of my study, I hear many stories from the Latinx parents I interviewed that mirror the story of my parents, who left Mexico in the 1970s to work on California’s farms and ultimately settled in New York City in the 1980s. In their children, I see myself, who, like many of these little ones, also immigrated at a very young age to a new country. Although shocked and misunderstood at first for not speaking the school language, like them, I developed resilience and still acquired another language.
I close off with this because during the time of our annual meeting, Latinx and other immigrant communities in the USA were being terrorized and illegally abducted from their homes, workplaces, and even their children’s schools. Children have also been taken away. As Dr. Jasińska’s talk showed us, all this adverse experience will have a detrimental effect on the development of children in these communities.
Despite this heartbreaking reality impacting many Latinx families in the USA, I left our annual meeting with a renewed commitment to ensuring that our research, teaching, and impact reflect the lives of the people we claim to serve. Because full literacy is not just about skill — it is about justice.
References
Armony, V. (2017). Settling north of the U.S. border: Canada’s Latinos and the particular case of Québec. Canadian Issues, 57-61
Brabant, A. (2017). Sabor Latino: The heart of Little Latin America. Mémoires d’immigrations, MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises. https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/en/sabor-latino-heart-little-latin-america
Burns, M. K., Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Evaluating components of the active view of reading as intervention targets: Implications for social justice. School Psychology (Washington, D.C.), 38(1), 30–41.
Calderón Moya, M. (2021). Links between white settler colony in Québec and the barriers to the economic integration of skilled Latin American immigrants. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 16(1).
Gabriel, R., & López, F. (2024). The role of asset-based pedagogy in an interactive view of reading. Educational Psychologist, 59(4), 233-249.
Ibrahim, A. C., & Jian, J. (2023). Understanding the rise of Mexican migration to Canada. Migraciones Internacionales, 11(2), 55–80. Retrieved from https://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/mlr/v11n2/2448-5306-mlr-11-02-55.pdf
Paola Picco, M. A. (2008). Multicultural Libraries’ services and social integration: The case of public libraries in Montreal Canada. Public Library Quarterly, 27(1), 41–56.
Statistics Canada. (2024). Latin American immigration to Canada. Retrieved from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2024042-eng.htm
Ville de Montréal, Arrondissement Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. (n.d.). Les bibliothèques (Chapitre 8) [PDF]. https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_cdn_fr/media/documents/pd_chapitre_8.pdf
